Arts Council of Central Louisiana presents Gina Chavez

A multi-ethnic Latin pop songstress, Gina Chavez is a 10-time Austin Music Award winner. Her bilingual record, Up.Rooted, topped both the Amazon and Latin iTunes charts following a feature on NPR’s All Things Considered and has been hailed by The Boston Globe, USA Today, and Texas Monthly.

Her Tiny Desk concert made NPR’s top 15 of 2015. Fresh off a 10-country tour as a cultural ambassador with the U.S. State Department, Chavez’s passionate collection of bilingual songs take audiences on a journey through the Americas, blending the sounds and rhythms of the region with tension and grace. Her Spanish-language anthem, “Siete-D” (Grand Prize winner of the 2014 John Lennon Songwriting Contest) recounts her experience volunteering in a gang-dominated suburb of San Salvador where she is a co-founder of The Niñas Arriba College Fund for young Latinas.

See for yourself, and if you don’t know her already, I dare you to walk away and not become a fan.”— NPR TINY DESK

Austin musician Gina Chavez never thought she’d see the day when two women could marry in Texas. Then again, she never thought she would marry a woman.

“Heaven Knows,” the first single off her upcoming five-song EP, Lightbeam, is the musical journey of twelve years in love; a love Chavez never thought she would experience.

“I was 24, staunchly Catholic and I’d had great, healthy relationships. But I’d never been in love,” Chavez said. “Then I met this girl with a smile that made me question everything I thought I knew.”

Lightbeam, set to release on Friday, September 14, 2018, is a sonic departure for Chavez who is known for her signature style of bilingual Latin folk-pop that topped the iTunes and Amazon Latin charts with her award-winning album, Up.Rooted. The 2015 Austin Musician of the Year traded her acoustic guitar for the smooth tones of a Gibson hollow body, and called upon producer Dwight A. Baker (MISSIO, Alpha Rev, The Wind and The Wave, Josh Abbott Band) to lay down five soulful and diverse songs, that expand upon her previous work with same lively and sophisticated spirit that her fans have grown to love.

“These are songs my heart has been wanting to sing for so long,” Chavez said. “To shout from the rooftops that I am in love! To tell the world about this incredible woman who lights me up and calls me to my best self, and show that our love is more than tolerable. It’s the kind of love we’re made for.”

Recorded in eight days at Matchbox Studios in Austin, Texas, the EP features some of Austin’s finest — Dave Boyle (keys), Conrad Choucroun (drums), and Steve Terebecki (bass) — on five unapologetically personal tracks that explore longing, faith, beauty, and sacrifice.

“I took some time to allow myself to write,” Chavez said. “No boundaries, no genres, just me and my guitar, and I was pretty surprised when these soul-tinged songs bubbled up. But this is the story my heart wanted to tell; the story what it means to be a Catholic Latina and fall in love with a woman; the story of what it means to live your heart no matter what the world says.”

Chavez and her wife, Jodi Granado, met at the University Catholic Center at UT Austin. The next decade would see the couple through the ups and downs of a long-distance relationship, coming out to friends and family, hiding their love while volunteering in El Salvador, and building a life together in Austin. Last year, Chavez and Granado, still practicing Catholics, tied the knot at Tiny T Ranch just east of Austin — two years after marriage equality became legal in Texas.

With 10 Austin Music Awards, an NPR Tiny Desk with more than half a million views, frequent tours as a cultural ambassador with the U.S. State Department, being named an official 2018 SXSW artist for the fifth year in a row with her six-piece band and a trip to Kyrgyzstan in April 2018, Chavez and her wife, Jodi, have embarked on a European mini-tour that kicks off the couple’s honeymoon and the release of “Lightbeam.”

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Art is more than entertainment. Art is the most precious brain trust we have among the many treasures within our families, our cultures, our nation, and our world. Art outlives each of us, and is the purest history of the human spirit - not only what we are, but what we dream of becoming. read more...

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